Running..running...as fast as you can

My latest obsession is running. My target is to run a full marathon. One day. Maybe not this year's Melbourne Marathon. Maybe next year. It depends.

One of the first events I did was Melbourne's Mother's Day Classic. That day we witness about 20,000 Melburnians participated in the event - 8km, 4km and fun walk. A little background of the event can be found here: Mother's Day Classic.

My official personal best on that day was 28:04.7 wearing bib number 5316. I ran for 4km.
Overall placement was 3296
Age division placement was 561
Gender placement was 2316

So what did I get from this? Purely self satisfaction. Just the knowledge that I have only myself to prove to and my personal best just kept getting better. Motivation by self is far more rewarding than external forces.
I will update more with pictures too.

New Flickr account

Come now, come all to my new collection:

Flickr - Kathy DIO

For my love of photography, I'd probably upload most of my work up there - this includes my attempts at HDR photos not too long ago.

The latest upload is my New Zealand collection. Mind you, selecting the best from 1700 ++ photos is not easy!

Enjoy...

Painting Tutorials

I have since started painting religiously and I have to say that I needed more 'technical' help than expression help. There is a vast resources available to us and with advance technology, we could access documents or having a tutor in the comfort of our house. Although the sound of tele-conference and video conversation sounds aluring, we having to make use of what is available, fast, easy and most important of all, FREE.

For painting, I have to admit to the magic of YouTube. YouTube provides access to a plethora of contributors from all over the world, and the best of this service is it is in video only! So we could have 'hands-on' tutor from our desktop, showing all necessary things to the painting process.

The first contributer I'd love to highlight is adilrasheedonline. I didn't mind the fact that he doesn't have a commentary, but the observation of his techniques showed that he is genuinely talented. His method might not be the same from the basic watercolour books that we have but it doesn't mean that his method was wrong. The following is one of his brilliant videos:

Watercolor Painting of a Landscape

When we are learning, we are supposed to compare and seek knowledge from various resources so that when disputes or complications arise, we have alternatives and various resolution to address the problems. This brings to another recommended contributor from YouTube.

It is ShowMeHow Series DVD, so I assumed that this is a major project by the contributor to get things organized. The videos are very easy to follow and the explanations are awesome! Even a 10 year-old child could fathom every step.

Show Me How DVD on YouTube

The magic of resources is working perfectly with YouTube. As soon as I am finished with one contributor, I could always switch to others by looking at 'Related Videos' tab. It is such a good opportunity to increase our lifeskills without spending a dime on a teacher or tutor.

Another awesome watercolour tutorial website I've come acrossed is:
Watercolor Painting Free Lessons and Tutorials
I have to say that is incredibly easy to take up painting but we have to build the momentum and motivation to stay on it. This same principle applies to every hobby we take up and as soon as the affection for it wears away, we just leave it cold.

Till then, I will come again...Goodbye!

Note: When I was publishing this post, the video upload onto the blogspot was unsuccessful so I have to just provide the link so that you all can have direct access to it. Enjoy...